I drove around the Stargate datacenter construction site in Abilene TX late April. They have maybe 5 or 6 of these large gas fired plants being built near the power substation. I'm not 100% sure what they are but i've seen the same things out in Midland/Odessa for power generation. I'm assuming they'll be generating electricity.
/the scale of that site is like nothing i've ever seen. 100s of those giant cooling units lined up and enough piping that my wife said it reminder her of the refineries on the TX coast.
> The fact that the indexes don't have our back is a huge problem
how could an index fund possibly have anyone's back? It's in index of the top 500 publicly traded companies. that's all. If SpaceX or Tesla or Anthropic or anyone else fall out of the top 500 then they fall off the index by definition.
I think a lot of these comments are coming from extreme emotions associated with AI and Elon Musk and not so much the way things work and will play out.
No, that's not all. They had additional criteria that they changed right when big-name companies wanted to get added. Now, if they had historically gone by pure market cap, and these companies met that, then you'd have a point.
Exactly right, there's even ones so conservative they market themselves as cash equivalent. Basically zero gain/loss in those funds. If you're so worried then go login to your 401k and change it.
Sucks for Azure. They were the chosen one but couldn’t keep up with demand. Once OpenAI got out of that exclusivity deal saying Azure wasn’t reliable I knew AWS was where they were headed.
Try to keep perspective, these valuations are just functions of the stock market the end result of some spreadsheet. They have nothing to do with quality of life. Why would you relate those two things in the first place?
They are fundamentally different, but people desire they be aligned. The public expects the economy to producing higher quality of life for us, otherwise what is it doing? And for whom? But whether it actually does so is a function of other things. That gap seems bigger than usual right now with AI and tech eating the whole economy.
This is not a useful response to "how long does this last? I've been hearing it for a decade."
The phrase "late capitalism" itself has been used for just over a century now[0]; while I believe the USA is destroying what made the nation successful and will therefore probably[1] go into decline before 2035, there's no particular reason to tie the weird aspects of the economic system to the USA's political nonsense.
Also, the USSR would be the opposite example of your first sentence, as the collapse was a big surprise to everyone (both inside and outside the bloc) even a few years before it happened.
The Roman Empire would be the example for long-term decline, as that took one or more centuries depending on where you count the zenith (180 CE to 376 CE as the start, the Western Roman Empire was definitely dead by 476 CE).
But you seem to want to present it as a "in our lifetime" kind of thing; for that, I would suggest the British Empire, which peaked just before WW1, yet was obviously a broken power by the time of the Suez Crisis of 1956 just 42 years later though full decolonisation took longer (and if you ask Sinn Féin, Plaid Cymru, and the SNP, isn't really finished).
[1] There's a very narrow path where enough anti-corruption votes combine for a government which does something that, ironically, Trump promised in his first term: "drain the swamp". It can't just be "Dems win", it has to be broad consensus that not only takes this seriously but also is seen by the world to do so.
The SpaceX IPO confuses me, with the kind of testing they do the stock price is going to be a roller coaster ride. Every splashdown with an explosion, even if planned, is going to impact the stock price. Are they hurting for cash? Why even IPO if you don't need the cash?
Their IPO sees the company as doing a small amount of space and $22T of B2B services. If you believe that then space launches shouldn’t have much impact on their valuation compared to things that affect their hypothetical services revenue. If you think the value comes from the rockets, you would need some very large multiples to justify their desired valuation in which case, sure, the rockets are the cause of volatility…
In your 401k portal/website there's usually a setting like "I plan to retire on year X". When you set that, or something similar, there's typically a managed fund that gradually decreases risk as you approach that year. When you have lots of time before retirement you can ride the ups and downs but as you get closer the less time you have to recover from a downturn so the more conservative you want your investments.
If you're really worried and want to be conservative tell the portal you want to retire in 2030. That will allocate your investments to something conservative and you'll be more protected from a downturn. On the other hand, you'll also be equally protected from an upswing.
/the scale of that site is like nothing i've ever seen. 100s of those giant cooling units lined up and enough piping that my wife said it reminder her of the refineries on the TX coast.
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